Page 28 of How to Bite Your Neighbor and Win a Wager
Vincent’s hand slipped out from under the blanket, fumbling around to find Wesley’s arm. “You can’t—you can’t take me to a hospital,” he said, words still a little slurred. “No insurance.”
“Oh,” was all Wesley could manage. Vincent thought Wes washelpinghim. But of course he would. Why else would Wesley have loaded his unconscious body into a car, after playing video games with him, laughing with him, messaging with him like it was his job, finding blood for him, caring about him? Why would it occur to someone as genuine and good hearted as Vincent that all of that had just been a scam?
Particularly, when not all of it was.
Wesley inhaled, and it sounded, stupidly, like a sob. “No hospitals.” No research labs, either. No proof of his mother’s death. Nothing to bring Vitalis-Barron to its bastardly knees. But Vincent… Vincent was going to be okay. “You’re awake? You’re feeling better?”
Vincent gave a little sound almost like a laugh, but with no humor and all relief. “Like something chewed up my organs. But I’m alive. I think.”
Wesley’s arms shook. Vincent had to be feeling it through his grip. He had to be sensing the stutter in Wesley’s heart, the lump beneath his throat. He had to know. His voice trembled a little as he asked, “What do you think did that?”
“I’m not sure.” Vincent went quiet as Wes turned them back onto the freeway, heading the other direction, toward the Vitalis-Barron complex once more. “Not eating so long, then the sun, then feeding that fast?”
Wes watched the exit he’d missed last time. He tracked their path toward it, beside it, and passed. Then it was behind them, taking its dark and deadly future with its dark and deadly history with it. And he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do about that.
“Can we go back…” Vincent muttered, trailing off for so long in the middle that Wesley thought he’d finished, “to your house?”
“Back home, got it.”
Vincent squeezed his arm and pulled his hand under the blanket. “Don’t worry, if I pass out.” He already sounded halfway there. “Brain’s still mushy.”
“You sleep if you need it. I’ll be here.” The words made Wesley’s mouth dry, sounding wrong, miserable. Lies. But he was pretty sure Vincent couldn’t tell, because he was pretty sure Vincent was already asleep.
5
Wesley managed to wake Vincent again just long enough to help him to the couch, settling him down where he’d first passed out nearly an hour ago. He tucked a pillow beneath the vampire’s head and laid the blanket from the car ride over him.
“I’m going to shower,” he said.
Vincent curled into the cushions with a hum. Same couch, same vampire, same state of consciousness, same asshole staring down at him with weak knees and shaking hands. But now Vincent looked so different: soft and loose, a bit of color back in his pale skin and the tension gone from his forehead. In the little gap between his lips, Wes could make out one fang.
His phone chimed, and he pulled it out on instinct, expecting a message from Kendall. Instead he found a check in email from Matthew Babcock. It ended with an encouragement and a picture attached of a half-conscious vampire looking nearly as pained as Vincent had earlier, their cotton-candy colored hair fallen into their eyes and a cut across their cheek. Wes swore they’d drawn a cartoon of him outside a bar the month after his mother died. It had been the only time he’d smiled all week.
Soon you’ll be recruiting with the best of us, or as War Call puts it, you’ll run them up the white flag and down the other side!
Matthew
Wesley shoved his phone back into his pocket and stalked to the fridge. He yanked out the blood bag, needing desperately to get it somewhere that Vincent wouldn’t accidently find it—or drink it—ever again, but as his vision tunneled and his feet moved, he found himself carrying it up the stairs and into the bathroom with him. He stripped out of his clothes and turned on the shower. By the time he’d come mostly to his senses, he was sitting in the empty tub, staring at the blood. A little voice in his head taunted him to drink it; if he suffered too, wouldn’t that make up for all the shit he’d put Vincent through, all that he’d failed his mother in life and in death, all the ways he couldn’t live up to being a real adult like Kendall with a job and a retirement fund, all the lives that were going to keep being ruined every day Vitalis-Barron’s research labs ran?
“But if my existence starts hurting anyone but myself, then maybe I don’t deserve to exist at all.”
Wes wrapped his hands furiously around the bag of blood, shooting the crimson life source across his feet and down the drain. He breathed hard after, as though he’d climbed over a mountain and come down the other side. His whole body felt like it, worn through, torn up, chest broken and heart bleeding.
The shower’s water slowly washed away the blood. He sat and watched it, sobbing until his eyes burned, until he was pretty sure the only time he’d let himself sob this much had been the night after his mother’s funeral. He leaned his head against the tile and stared at the drain, hair matted down around his face and water still pouring across his cheek. Everything he’d done to bring himself—to bring Vincent—to this point seemed like a brand on his soul. He would not forget it.
Because there was no way in heaven or hell or anything in between that Wesley Smith Garcia was ever letting Vitalis-Barron get their hands on his vampire.
12
VINCENT
The house was quiet when Vincent woke. The digital clock on the old cable box showed 8:15pm. He groaned. Babcock would be expecting him on the job soon. But Vincent lay there for a few minutes longer, soaking in the smell of the couch—Wesley’s scent, along with the faint lingering of something a little more floral—and tracking the way the shadows from the streetlights fell across the coffee table.
Wes had left a note on it.
Gone to bed.
PS: I tried to move your bag of blood while looking through the fridge and I accidently dumped it, sorry! You can have some of mine whenever you need it though, hot mouth or not. You deserve to live.
